Pablo Picasso

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris

Collectors Gallery, Inc.

Sale: Sotheby Parke Bernet, Los Angeles, November 20, 1972, lot 28

Private Collection, Japan (acquired at the above sale)

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, oeuvres de 1962 et 1963, vol. 23, Paris, 1971,  no. 165, illustrated pl. 82

The Picasso Project, Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture, The Sixties I, 1960-1963, San Francisco, 2002, no. 63-052, illustrated p. 336

The subject of the painter and model appears intermittently throughout Picasso's oeuvre, as it was a subject that explored the tension between the creator and the model who inspires him to create.    In the second half of his career, this theme took on an even greater meaning in that it expressed the artist's psychological concerns regarding the act of painting.   In this picture from 1963, Picasso explores the power dynamic between the artist and his model and the complexity of that relationship.  As was the case for most of the artist/model compositions from the 1960s, the present work is intended to be a depiction of Picasso painting Jacqueline, who was the artist's primary model and companion during the last years of his life. 

Klaus Gallwitz has written about Picasso's painter and model compositions from the 1960s and has made the following observations:  "Only with advancing years did Picasso recognize in painter and model the radical point of departure which elevates the physical process of painting to the subject of painting itself.  Confrontation of the model unexpectedly leads to the artistic monologue, to reflections on realms of which, far more than the studio, are part of the artist's 'inwardness.'  The quintessence of painting acquires a new meaning when the model returns the painter's gaze and begins to ask questions which have previously been the prerogative of the artist.  Parody, irony, self-irony, and paradox are the catalysts in this reversal, as the artist begins to justify himself before his work.  Picasso accepted this self-formulated challenge" (Klaus Gallwitz, Picasso: The Heroic Years, New York, 1985, p. 161).